How Can I Organize Information? Let Me Count the Ways

January 8, 2008 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

As I read through a few posts from Lynda Moulton, Jack Vinson and Jessica Baumgart, all involved in my ASIS&T 2007 and Gilbane panels late last year, I am pausing to absorb the surprising rate at which we've collectively moved away from the double drawer file cabinets and dewey decimal systems that I learned to use only a decade or two ago.

The approach to media is changing from paper documents to a mix of electronic documents, wiki and blog pages, database records, and comments.

Lynda does a nice job with an overview of the semantic evolution of search, with pointers to the relevant presentations and key points made at the Gilbane Conference text mining track.

The approach to cataloguing is moving from staightforward catalogue and hierarchical organizations to more flexible human organized taxonomies and user generated tags, as well as implicit and explicit entity "clouds" extracted from content based on text information.

Page / document rank is a wholly new concept that was not commonly understood as much as 10 or even 5 years ago, especially when you consider the variables affecting rank which may include recency, number of links or tags, and linguistic analysis that goes beyond simple word matching.

As search changes, so shall content, both in terms of how we orient ourselves towards collections of pages instead of more cumbersome documents and in terms of how we organize information explicitly vs. leaving some of the heavy lifting to the search engines.

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